With events
Sagre and feste in Lazio
25 towns
Each town page lists what happens there and the month it happens in, with the source. Always check with the town before you travel.
Velletri
Province: Roma · 332 m
The Castelli Romani town where Augustus grew up, now the largest wine commune of its hills.
- ✷ We've been
Caprarola
Province: Viterbo · 510 m
A Cimini hill town above Lago di Vico, dominated by the pentagonal Villa Farnese that Vignola built for the Farnese cardinals between 1559 and 1573.
Arpino
Province: Frosinone · 450 m
The Volscian-Roman hill town in the Liri valley that produced Marius and Cicero, with a pre-Roman acropolis above the modern center.
Anagni
Province: Frosinone · 424 m
The hill town in Ciociaria where a September 1303 assault on a reigning pope inside his own palace ended the medieval claim to papal supremacy.
Anguillara Sabazia
Province: Roma · 195 m
A medieval cape town jutting into Lake Bracciano, twenty-five kilometers from Rome, built above a 5700 BC Neolithic lakeshore village.
Canale Monterano
Province: Roma · 376 m
A hilltop village next to the burned ghost town of Monterano, where a roofless Baroque church and fountain still stand.
Cerveteri
Province: Roma · 81 m
An Etruscan capital seven kilometers inland from the Tyrrhenian coast, with the Banditaccia necropolis holding 1,000 tombs in the largest ancient cemetery in the Mediterranean.
Montefiascone
Province: Viterbo · 590 m
A 590-meter hill town on the highest hill of the Volsini, source of Est! Est!! Est!!!.
Oriolo Romano
Province: Viterbo · 420 m
A planned sixteenth-century village in the Sabatini hills, laid out in 1560 by a Santacroce nobleman on land cleared from an ancient beech wood.
San Felice Circeo
Province: Latina · 100 m
A medieval borgo on the flank of a promontory that Homer made the home of Circe in the Odyssey.
Sutri
Province: Viterbo · 291 m
An Etruscan and Roman town on a tuff spur, with a rock-cut amphitheater carved straight from the volcanic stone of the Cimini.
Viterbo
Province: Viterbo · 326 m
The medieval capital of the Tuscia, papal seat for five popes between 1257 and 1281 and home to the longest conclave in Church history.
Bolsena
Province: Viterbo · 350 m
A medieval town at 350 meters on the eastern shore of Europe's largest volcanic lake, where a Bohemian priest reported a Eucharistic miracle in 1263.
- ✷ We've been
Capranica
Province: Viterbo · 370 m
A medieval hill town on the old Via Cassia, taken by the Anguillara family in 1305 and remembered as the place Petrarch stayed in 1337.
Casperia
Province: Rieti · 397 m
A Sabina hill village named Aspra in Virgil's Aeneid, called that until 1947, ringed by walls from 1282.
Castel San Pietro Romano
Province: Roma · 763 m
A 763-meter hill village above Palestrina, built on the acropolis of ancient Praeneste and inside the Colonna fortress walls.
Castelnuovo di Porto
Province: Roma · 250 m
A tufa-ridge borgo twenty-five kilometers north of Rome inside the Parco di Veio, dominated by a Renaissance fortress above the Tiber valley.
Fondi
Province: Latina · 9 m
The plain town between the Ausoni and Aurunci mountains where the Caetani built a castle in the middle of farmland instead of on a hill.
Nemi
Province: Roma · 521 m
The smallest comune in the Castelli Romani, perched at 521 meters above a volcanic crater lake the Romans called the mirror of Diana.
Orvinio
Province: Rieti · 840 m
The highest borgo in the Monti Lucretili park at 840 meters, called Canemorto until 1863.
Rieti
Province: Rieti · 405 m
The Sabine capital on the Velino, claimed as the center of Italy, under Monte Terminillo and the Franciscan sanctuaries of the Valle Santa.
- ✷ We've been
Ronciglione
Province: Viterbo · 441 m
A tufa-brick borgo above Lake Vico, fortified by the Prefects of Vico and crowned Borgo dei Borghi in 2023.
Subiaco
Province: Roma · 408 m
The Aniene valley town where Benedict spent three years in a cliff cave, and where Italy's first printed book appeared in 1465.
Tivoli
Province: Roma · 235 m
A travertine town on the Aniene falls twenty-five kilometers east of Rome, holding two separate UNESCO sites: Hadrian's villa below and the Villa d'Este above.
Vitorchiano
Province: Viterbo · 285 m
A peperino borgo built on a single volcanic boulder near Viterbo.
The slow-trip planner
Plan a slow trip across the towns travelers skip.
Answer five questions. We will shape a geographically coherent slow trip from the 1,000 Italian towns most travelers skip. Yours to save and share.
From elsewhere in Italy
Five more towns to discover
Visso
Province: Macerata
The northern Sibillini gate at 607 meters where the Nera meets the Ussita, holding one of two surviving manuscripts of Leopardi's L'Infinito.
Goriano Sicoli
Province: L'Aquila
At 720 meters in the Subequana valley, a medieval village drawn by M.C. Escher in 1929 keeps a May ritual folklorists trace to Demeter.
Ugento
Province: Lecce
A Messapian-Roman town five kilometers from the Ionian, where a Baroque castle sits on the walls of the ancient city of Ozan.
Fontanellato
Province: Parma
A Parma-plain town built around the Rocca Sanvitale, the moated fortress at its center.
Pescina
Province: L'Aquila
A Marsica town at 735 meters, on the rim of the drained Fucino basin, that lost five thousand of six thousand people in a single morning in 1915.